GMO Myths and Truths: Muddying the waters with imprecise terms

This post will cover the "Muddying the waters" subsection of chapter one in GMO Myths and Truths.  This subsection is mostly tied to section 1.1 and may have been better suited to just be a part of it.  It basically covers the same ground and with the same level of verifiability.

GMO Myths and Truths: The genetic engineering technique (1.1)

So here we are.  The first section of GMO Myths and Truths.  This will probably be the shortest section review as this one has no cited papers backing it up.  That isn't immediately a negative to it as it seems to be arguing definitions.  As the section header states...

Myth: Genetic engineering is just an extension of natural breeding Truth: Genetic engineering is different from natural breeding and poses special risks

GMO Myths and Truths: The paper at a glance

This will be my first post on the paper GMO Myths and Truths by Earth Open Source.  This is more about my first impressions on the topic and putting my bias out in the open, and less about the actual contents of the paper, which I will get into in the next post.

Where to begin?

So I've thought for a while... I have this blog and I don't really do anything with it.  I used to rant about politics, religion, and the like on it more, but when I finally joined the hive mind that is Facebook, most of my rants moved there.  However, I've started to feel like all I do on FB is comment on politics or social issues.  So to clear that up from people's status feeds, I think I'll start blogging it again.  I can make better responses in blogs anyway, FB status posts don't let me fisk or reference link other pages.

As for a regular subject to blog about for a while, I've decided to delve into The "GMO Myths and Truths" paper that I caught sight of a few weeks back.  Quick back story on that, a friend of one of my aunt's started posting anti-GMO links, which got my aunt posting them, which got me long-windedly commenting on them, which resulted in her posting a page that linked to this paper as a counter argument ("Scientists even say they're dangerous").  It's a huge paper and what little I've read of it hasn't impressed me much.

That being said, as a skeptic, I feel like I should educate myself on this.  It's being touted as the end-all argument against GMO food production around the crowds that are against that sort of thing.  I'm not part of that crowd myself (I like to joke that I wish some brand would sell a non-organic, all GMO product so I could buy it), but neither am I part of any group that stands to financially benefit one way or the other from public opinion on the subject.  Hell, I'm not even a biologist or a geneticist, but the benefit of the information age is that I can probably find some who can explain what the hell some of this stuff means.

Damning for the paper, the way I got to it was through a few pages that were a little on the tin foil hat side of credulity.  Not to shoot the messenger or anything; I just feel like a review of it from the skeptical blogosphere needs to happen, even if it is by a dreadfully bored software engineer who's decided his boredom is enough to warrant reading the paper's 123 pages and 650 cited sources in order to make heads or tails of it.

Fun times ahead.